Mission Eastis a Danish international relief and development organisation, working in Eastern Europe and Asia. Our aim is to deliver relief aid, to create and support long-term development projects and to empower local aid organisations to carry on the work independently. Making no racial, religious or political distinction between those in need, we aim to assist the most vulnerable.

Food aid to North Korea

Copenhagen, June 6th, 2011.

Together with Mission East’s ambassador, Mikael Jarnvig, I have just returned from a four-day visit to North Korea, a country most of us have heard about, but that only few have visited.
We went to North Korea with Mission East’s Operations Director Peter Drummond Smith, who is still in the country continuing the needs assessments we started last week in order to possibly uncover the extent to which the population in North Korea is in need of large-scale food assistance. The North Koreans are used to scarce supplies of food, but at this time the entire population may be facing one of the biggest food crises in the nation’s history. Besides carrying out an evaluation of the need for large-scale emergency assistance, our mission was to monitor the distribution of 50 tons of rice and 2.5 tons of TopNutri – a food supplement rich in proteins, vitamins and minerals enough to cover the dietary needs of children in the current situation. Mission East had purchased the rice in China and the 2.5 tons of TopNutri had been flown in from Denmark. The target group were 17,000 vulnerable children in kindergartens and nurseries in the north-western part of the country, where our Finnish partner FIDA have carried out development projects during the past ten years and has the capacity to monitor that the aid is distributed to the right beneficiaries.
The impression from the food distribution was indeed that there was a precise overview of how much had been given to the children in the various institutions – an impression that was confirmed on several occasions.
The second objective of our trip was to evaluate the need for further assistance and for large relief interventions in the country, and this proved to be a much more difficult task.
It took the authorities several days before they showed us some of the children most severely affected by the food crisis, children in two orphanages in Kangwon Province in the eastern part of the country, a province named by the UN as one of five provinces where the population will have the biggest need for food distributions during the coming months, and where the UN estimate that more than 20 % of all children show signs of stunting following extended periods of chronic malnutrition. We actually measured 33 children in these institutions ourselves, with a view to evaluating their nutritional status, gathering information on weight, height, age and mid-upper-arm-circumference. The data collected showed that only one of the children was on the verge of normal values, with more than half of the rest showing evidence of severe malnutrition and with the rest moderately malnourished. These figures correspond to the information we were given that since February the rations of rice given to these children had been reduced to only one sixth of the norm, beside which they had been given milk and bread powder from the UN. But the evidence was clear that these children had not received enough nourishment during the past months. Several of the children were in such bad shape that they looked like children from some of the worst hunger crises in Africa. The girl showing the worst symptoms was six years old, weighed only 10.6 kgs and had a mid-upper-arm-circumference of only 10.0 cms. She was severely malnourished and medically speaking at risk of dying! So the conclusion from our data collection was obviously that these children were in need of further food assistance.
Now, the big question is to which extent the general population in North Korea are in need of food assistance. The UN have estimated that a fourth of the population of 24 million people will need food aid. Obviously, this figure is difficult to verify in only a few days, wherefore we continue our investigations this week in order to get a better picture of the needs.
But the following information points to a need for large-scale assistance:
• 80% of the harvest of barley and wheat was destroyed as a result of the double catastrophe of severe flooding in September and October and extreme degrees of cold during December and January.
• The potato harvest is delayed and cannot take place until the end of July at the earliest.
• Several reports indicate that the storages of rice are running out – and in some places are already empty: Normally, every North Korean receives 573 grams of rice per day. In May, this figure had been reduced to 190 grams and in June to 150 grams. In several institutions the storages were already empty, and the leaders could not answer the question as to when new supplies were expected.
• At the same time, large parts of the population have been commanded to plant rice in the fields throughout the country.
What we are now trying to evaluate is the nutritional situation for the average North Korean. Normally, a part of their diet consists of herbs and seaweed – we just do not know if the share of these dietary sources has increased due to the lack of rice. Meat is a product in scarce supply and most North Koreans only eat meat when celebrating the birthdays of the leaders of the country.
Mission East is ready to react to the need for help and will first collect funds to meet the need for food in children’s institutions where the needs are evident. Then, we shall decide whether we want to carry out larger scale distributions of food to hunger-stricken North Koreans.

In North Korea, most of the ploughing is done with oxen and sowing is done by hand. The country is lacking fuel for agricultural machinery, which anyway is in short supply. The fact that the agricultural sector is so inefficient increases the risk of a possible hunger crisis.